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Teaching Tarleton

2014; Penn State University Press; Volume: 12; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.5325/fscotfitzrevi.12.1.0143

1755-6333

Cam Cobb, Natasha G. Wiebe, Michael K. Potter, Bryant Mangum,

American Literature and Humor Studies

High school and university students—and I've taught both—like to communicate with mystery, which likely accounts for the persistence of rituals even in this day of a post-lost, millennial generation, now nearly a hundred years removed from the one that Fitzgerald declared “grown up to find all gods dead, all wars fought, all faiths in man shaken” (Paradise 260). Students, I think, are excited when they discover that some mysteries do, in fact, remain—and that contact with them is possible through works of fiction, quite often through short stories, taught in high school or university classrooms. These mysteries seem often associated with a place, whether a room, or a building, or a patch of soil, or a city that has been touched, even if just for a moment, by enchantment. Among many examples, Faulkner transforms Oxford, Mississippi, into Jefferson, located in the fictional Yoknapatawpha County in “A Rose for Emily” (1930), just one of his many works located in this setting; Sherwood Anderson immortalizes Clyde, Ohio, as Winesburg, Ohio, in the often-anthologized story “Hands” from Winesburg, Ohio (1919); Zora Neale Hurston mythologizes her hometown of Eatonville, Florida, as the home of Janie and Joe Starks in “Matt Bonner's Mule,” a section taken from Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) and frequently anthologized as a story. The list of literal places touched by a writer's magic and transformed into mythic settings that house mystery—that is, settings that create representations of reality that defy easy access through the senses—is long.Fitzgerald, of course, touched many actual places in this way, creating enchanted worlds sprung free of actual time and place and existing in a dimension filled with mystery. An actual Montana dude ranch that Fitzgerald once visited is now and forever also a diamond mountain as big as the Ritz-Carlton Hotel. Manhasset Neck and Great Neck, New York, will also never cease to be the mythical East Egg and West Egg in The Great Gatsby, as Louisville, Kentucky, will remain the enchanted Louisville of Gatsby and Daisy's first love, which keeps its actual name in Gatsby, but which also in the non-fictional world honors its mythic status through ongoing disputes over which house in Louisville was actually the house that belonged to Daisy Fay's parents in the novel. A less-often discussed example of Fitzgerald's touching a specific place with enchantment and, in the process, mythologizing it, is that of Montgomery, Alabama, which becomes the fictional town of Tarleton, Georgia, a thinly disguised Montgomery of the 1920s. The three stories in the group set in Tarleton—“The Ice Palace” (1920), “The Jelly-Bean” (1920), and “The Last of the Belles” (1928), now known as the Tarleton Trilogy—are among Fitzgerald's best stories. Whether read and studied singly or as a group, these stories, in my experience, draw students in by inviting them to examine the ways by which Montgomery, the place where Scott and Zelda fell in love, becomes the mythic Tarleton, an enchanted place where the mystery that was and is romantic love, remained alive, though certainly not always entirely well, from the first story in the trilogy to the last.Early in the final story in the trilogy, “The Last of the Belles,” the narrator, Andy, reveals retrospectively that love and mystery are at the heart of all three stories. He informs the reader that he has been told that there are “only three girls” in Tarleton, a fact that interests him because “there was something magical about there being three girls” (Short Stories 450). Each girl is loved romantically by at least one man in each story, and each of the love stories provides the central focus of its narrative: Harry Bellamy loves Sally Carrol Happer in “The Ice Palace”; Jim Powell loves Nancy Lamar in “The Jelly-Bean”; Andy loves Ailie Calhoun in “The Last of the Belles.” In each case the reader is led to question, not each man's conviction that what he feels for each of the women is love, but rather whether the passion is for something that is less personal than the individual herself—a question familiar to readers of The Great Gatsby. In the case of Harry's love in “The Ice Palace,” is it Sally Carrol that he loves, or is it the exotic South that she so strongly identifies with and finally winds up choosing over the life Harry could offer her in the North? In Jim Powell's case, he says of Nancy Lamar, “I love her…. God!” (Short Stories 156); but the reader cannot ignore the subtext of Jim's feelings of social inadequacy that have perhaps led him to an idealization of this local doctor's daughter, a woman of privilege who has the luxury of declaring love for him in a moment of drunkenness and then proceeding on the same night to marry a man of higher social standing and more money than Jim. And in “The Last of the Belles,” Andy is fully convinced years after he had last seen Ailie Calhoun that he cares about her enough to return from his home in the North to Tarleton and marry her. When they are reunited he realizes that he had always been “deeply and incurably in love with her” (Short Stories 461). After he tells this to Ailie and asks her to marry him, she quickly turns him down because, as she says, she doesn't love him “that way” and, moreover, she could never “marry a Northern man” (Short Stories 461). The reader is left to question on what this love that Andy is convinced he feels for Ailie is founded. There is the hint that it is related to his wish to recapture a part of his youth and to his infatuation with the South. With Ailie gone, he realizes, “the South would be empty for [him] forever” (Short Stories 463).In all three Tarleton stories, Fitzgerald interrogates the subject of romantic love and its mysteries. However, in each story of the trilogy he complicates the love stories by closely connecting the passion that these men feel for the three women of Tarleton to other considerations—considerations of place (all of the women are associated with a magical city in the exotic South), of changing gender constructions (the three women exist in a time of dramatically increased freedom for women), and of social class (the personalities of all three women as well as their futures are, to some degree, tied to the privilege of their social position). The world of Tarleton is both of its time—that is, anchored in the rich cultural history of the Jazz Age—and beyond its time, sealed in the land of myth. In my experience of teaching all three of the Tarleton stories, I have found that they invite the reader both to enter contextually the world of 1920s Montgomery out of which the stories literally came and also to confront the world of mystery at the heart of three of Fitzgerald's most enchanted love stories.The roundtable discussion that follows addresses both of these worlds, and offers strategies for allowing students to view the Tarleton stories from many different perspectives.F. Scott Fitzgerald's writing is used in post-secondary classrooms around the world. While The Great Gatsby is his most widely recognized work, it is only one of his many texts taught in schools, from “Winter Dreams” (1922) to “Babylon Revisited” (1931). After all, there are approximately 175 short stories in his oeuvre, and over the years, critics have devoted more and more attention to his shorter works, offering educators a vast amount of secondary criticism to support their pedagogy.1 Three stories particularly useful in the classroom are “The Ice Palace,” “The Jelly-Bean,” and “The Last of the Belles.” Collectively known as the Tarleton Trilogy, these stories have received critical attention from academics since Arther Mizener discussed them in his 1951 biography of Fitzgerald, The Far Side of Paradise.2 In recent years, the Tarleton stories have been used in a number of university classrooms across North America.3What we lack, however, is pedagogy-oriented criticism that addresses the stories as educational tools. How exactly can the Tarleton Trilogy be used to foster learning experiences? As with many Fitzgerald stories, the trio offers a variety of possibilities. This roundtable will examine the Tarleton Trilogy from a pedagogical perspective, placing emphasis on deep learning.4 More specifically, it will describe the teaching philosophy and practices of Stella, a hypothetical professor, to illustrate how the trilogy might be used to foster critical inquiry by engaging dialogue and robust collaboration in a post-secondary setting.Varied classroom activities often lead students to take different approaches to their learning. A surface approach to learning “involves minimum engagement with the task, [and] typically a focus on memorization or applying procedures that do not involve reflection” (Smith and Colby 206). Conversely, in a deep learning approach, “the student focuses on relationships between various aspects of the content, formulates hypothesis or beliefs about the structure of the problem or concept, and relates more to obtaining an intrinsic interest in learning and understanding” (Smith and Colby 206). While surface learning and deep learning approaches are not defined as inherently good or bad processes, it is important to recognize that they are influenced by different approaches to teaching and assessment and may lead to very different sorts of learning experiences. In the following situations, Stella uses several teaching practices likely to inspire students to take deep learning approaches to their educational experience.Stella teaches in the English Department of her university. Her core research interests include social justice, self-identity, and modern American literature. She believes that for students to become invested in their learning they need to encounter planted opportunities to solve problems. She also holds that classrooms should be spaces where teachers and students engage in thoughtful dialogue on a variety of matters, including social issues.5 When teaching, Stella strives to foster an atmosphere that is conductive to collaboration and critical inquiry.To foster engaging learning experiences, Stella believes that teachers need to respond to the learning context. When reflecting on her own context, she asks herself a number of critical questions before preparing for a course, including the following: Who are the students? What do they know and what are they able to do? What are the skills they need to develop through taking this course, and why are these skills important? Stella believes that formulating these questions helps her to devise and facilitate learner-centered experiences. Moreover, she believes that deep learning experiences should present students with opportunities to solve problems creatively, collaborate, and critically inquire. She believes that students should have a voice, and she encourages students to articulate how they strategize their own work. Stella believes that student-centered deep learning shifts students from the more passive dynamic of information consumption to the more active interplay of dialogue and meta-cognitive awareness. Ultimately, she feels that learning is an intersection of context, active learning, and student engagement.One summer, Stella was given a copy of Some Sort of Epic Grandeur, Matthew J. Bruccoli's extensive 1981 biography of Scott Fitzgerald, revised in 1993 and 2002. With interest, she noted that Bruccoli described “The Last of the Belles” as a story that “examines the Yankee narrator's response to the South as expressed through his feelings for Ailie Calhoun” (267). Reading this passage prompted Stella to revisit the Tarleton Trilogy, and what follows is a description of three different contexts within which she used the stories in her teaching.Before choosing stories for her courses, Stella asks herself this question: What is the desired learning I intend to foster? Which stories could be used to support this learning? To address these questions, she reflects on the learning context within which she is teaching. Stella concludes that her twentieth-century literature class would benefit from further developing their critical literary skills. After all, critical literacy helps readers analyze thoughtfully the texts they encounter in their everyday lives. Struck by the retrospective nature and socio-cultural dimensions of the “The Last of the Belles,” Stella decides to use the story as an object and tool of study.Drawing from the socio-cultural dimensions of the story, she sets the following two learning outcomes: (1) identify key aspects of the socio-cultural context within which a story was written and published, and (2) draw conclusions from fictional social contexts regarding wider social issues. While both learning outcomes have benefits, the second can help to open critical conversations about social issues of the past and then compare and contrast them to issues of the present. “The Last of the Belles” struck Stella. From the perspective of the narrator's present time, the late 1920s, Andy gazes back to his past. He recalls a summer he was stationed in Tarleton, Georgia, Fitzgerald's fictionalized version of his wife Zelda's hometown of Montgomery, Alabama.In Stella's view, while critics have given limited attention to the socio-cultural dimensions of “The Last of the Belles,” the story presents a number of pedagogical possibilities in this regard.6 Consequently, she decides that a key question for her students to explore would be what “The Last of the Belles” can tell us about gender, class, and ethno-racial identity in 1920s America. Stella opens this unit by exploring the concept of socio-cultural context with her class. At the start of her first lesson she poses the following questions: What is socio-cultural context and what is a social issue?What do we need to know better to understand these things?During this discussion Stella invites students to list different dimensions of socio-cultural context on the board. Some key ideas the class identifies include ethno-racial identity, class, and gender. Stella makes a point of highlighting these three dimensions, informing students that as the unit continued they would reexamine the story in relation to these important dimensions of Fitzgerald's context. She also informs the class that learning about Fitzgerald's context will lead students to draw conclusions about his society, and make connections to their own.Stella then asks the class this question: How can we, as readers, learn about the context within which a writer writes and publishes? As the class brainstorms a number of ideas Stella invites some students to write their ideas on the board. She then focuses students on Fitzgerald himself by asking: How can we learn about the personal context within which Fitzgerald wrote and published “The Last of the Belles”? As the class discusses this question, students identify a variety of ways they might learn about Fitzgerald's context, including reading his correspondence and examining the ledger in which he recorded not only biographical events but also his earnings and sales figures.Stella then asks students to form groups and collaboratively identify ways readers might gather information about Fitzgerald's social context, specifically relating to ethno-racial identity, class, and gender. She instructs students to make a list and provide a rationalization for each of their choices, explaining that some groups will be called on to share their results with the class. During the subsequent class discussion, students identify a variety of ways of learning about 1920s America, such as examining laws, newspaper headlines, and advertisements. Stella tells students that the Saturday Evening Post itself could be a useful artifact to use to this end, and she also informs them that they will engage in this process later in the unit. Toward the end of the lesson, Stella asks students to reread the story and identify places where Fitzgerald portrays aspects of ethno-racial identity, class, or gender. After monitoring this process, she informs students that they will complete this task for homework and bring these context notes to the next lesson.Stella opens the second lesson by briefly sharing some background information regarding Fitzgerald and “The Last of the Belles.” She indicates that Fitzgerald wrote the story in late 1928 while struggling with his follow-up novel to The Great Gatsby. She also tells the class that Fitzgerald wrote “The Last of the Belles” with the intent of earning money, and the Post paid him $3,150 for the story. The Post itself, Stella explains, was widely distributed in Fitzgerald's era and had a circulation of nearly three million in the 1920s (Bruccoli Some Sort 534, 103). Stella explains that in the 1920s, editor George Horace Lorimer packaged the Post “for men, particularly the upwardly mobile, middle-class businessman of the Northeast, where America's financial life was based” (Potts 14). As with any magazine, the Post had certain boundaries regarding content (i.e., sexual content) and language (i.e., profanity) in the stories it published. As Fitzgerald had eighteen stories published in the Post from 1927 to 1929 alone, Stella explains that it would be reasonable to expect that he was familiar with these expectations.7 She asks the class to keep the final two points in mind when rereading the story, because the way Fitzgerald represents identity, class, and gender connects to the milieu of the Post, which itself links to the larger social milieu of late-1920s America.Stella next instructs students to take out their homework and share their context notes with the others in their group. She asks students to expand their context notes drawing from the ideas of the others in their group. After students complete this idea-sharing process, Stella asks groups to record three of their key ideas and/or questions using flipchart paper and markers she provides. Members of group one draw attention to the way Andy, the narrator, renders the syntax of Ailie's butler, Oliver, a minor character in the story whose job it is to turn Andy and his rival for Ailie's affection, Earl Schoen, away from Ailie's porch with the lie that she is not home. The group makes note of the fact that the character is an African-American servant presented in a one-dimensional manner and uses stereotyped dialect in his few lines of dialogue: “Didn't leave no information about [where she went]; just said she wasn't home”; “How'm I gonna tell her that when she ain't home?”; “Miss Ailie say she don't want to see that other gentleman [Schoen] about nothing never. She say come in if you [Andy] like” (Short Stories 416). The group connects this speech pattern to a contrasting line describing Ailie's voice that struck them in the opening pages: “There were notes in her voice that order slaves around” (Short Stories 416).The second group is drawn to the plight of Schoen, who is seen by both Ailie and Andy through the lens of social class and social-cultural capital.8 They take note of the way Andy first describes Schoen in terms of brute physicality and lack of intelligence: “Lieutenant Earl Schoen … as fine a physical specimen as I have ever seen. He was six-foot-three, with black hair, high color and glossy dark-brown eyes. He wasn't very smart and he was definitely illiterate, yet he was a good-officer, high-tempered and commanding, and with that becoming touch of vanity that sits well on the military” (Short Stories 454). The students question the meaning of the phrase “high color,” connecting it to an earlier line in the same paragraph describing how officers added to Andy's company from a separate training camp have “queer names without vowels in them” and seem to lack “any background at all” (Short Stories 454). The students then begin to explore the degree to which Andy is prejudiced against Schoen because of his ethnicity, and how the text makes no attempt to critique that bias, thereby encouraging readers to share Andy's antipathy toward the lieutenant. They also note how, after Earl is discharged from the army and no longer has a soldier's uniform to wear, Andy invokes prejudices against working-class tastes and style when describing his foil's manner of dress: Exteriorly Earl had about everything wrong with him that could be imagined. His hat was green, with a radical feather; his suit was slashed and braided in a grotesque fashion that national advertising and the movies have put an end to. Evidently he had been to his old barber, for his hair bloused neatly on his pink, shaved neck. It wasn't as though he had been shiny and poor, but the background of mill-town dance halls and outing clubs flamed out at you—or rather flamed out at Ailie. For she had never quite imagined the reality; in these clothes even the natural grace of that magnificent body had departed. (Short Stories 459) Group members discuss their reactions to the snobbery in the story, exploring how the unchallenged elitism affects their sympathy for Ailie.Group three, meanwhile, points out that through the voice of Andy, Fitzgerald uses a racial slur as an adjective to describe African-American music to distinguish Ailie from other young Tarleton women: “And by degrees I saw that she was consciously and voluntarily different from these other girls who sang nigger songs and shot craps in the country-club bar” (Short Stories 451). The group decides that in its reading it is unclear what Fitzgerald actually means by “nigger songs.” One student wonders if Andy refers to contemporary blues music—such as Blind Lemon Jefferson or Bessie Smith—or if he describes some other older type of music, such as spirituals.9 The group notes that Andy uses this racial slur not in a moment of anger or conflict but simply as an adjective, inferring that his racism is cavalier. The point is reinforced by a second, later use of the slur as Andy and Ailie, ten years after the end of the Great War, revisit the site of the camp outside Tarleton: “We parked under the broken shadow of a mill where there was the sound of running water and restive squawky birds and over everything a brightness that tried to filter into anything—into the lost nigger cabins, the automobile, the fastness of the heart” (Short Stories 458). Members of the group surmise that the word was permitted by the Post's editors and accepted by its readership, and they explore its effect on their sympathy for Andy and Ailie.Students in the fourth group comment on the way that gender expectations entrap Ailie in the story, limiting her options for determining her future as a woman. Specifically, students debate what it means to be a Southern belle, noting that new freedoms young women enjoyed in the war era (e.g., dating without chaperones) did not necessarily free them from behavioral strictures. The students discuss why Ailie would be attracted to Earl Schoen at all and what her rebellious courtship with a man outside of her social class could both gain and cost her in terms of status. Finally, the group discusses Andy's values, deciding through their reactions to his narrative descriptions of his feelings whether his “love” for her arises from a sympathetic desire to rescue her from her imprisonment in gender expectations or whether it simply encases her in it. The ideas and questions put forward by different groups leads to engaging dialogue regarding the world presented in “The Last of the Belles.” In closing this second lesson, Stella asks students to answer two questions for homework: Why should we use the Post to learn about socio-cultural context?How can the Post be used to learn about Fitzgerald's social milieu?Stella opens the third lesson by discussing the two homework questions with the class. Students offer a number of different reasons for using the Post to learn about Fitzgerald's social-cultural context, and they also have a variety of ideas regarding how to undertake this task. Stella highlights one strategy in particular, the idea of using advertisements as artifacts. She then informs the class that they will use a 1920s-era copy of the Post to learn about Fitzgerald's world. During the remainder of this lesson, Stella uses a document projector to display photocopied images from a 1929 issue of the Post. Students look at three advertisements, paying close attention to the words and images. Questions students are instructed to consider while examining each of the advertisements included these: What is being advertised?Who is the target audience?How does this advertisement portray ethno-racial identity, social class, and/or gender?What has led the class to these conclusions?After examining each advertisement, students have a few moments to take notes and reflect on the way they interpret (or read) what they see. Following each reflection, Stella engages the class in a discussion regarding the advertisement itself as well as her guiding questions. After discussing the content and design of the third advertisement Stella asks groups to develop a list of conclusions they could draw about the way ethno-racial identity, class, and gender are represented in the story as well as in the advertisements in the Post. She also asks groups to identify wider social issues relating to these three dimensions, as evident in the story and/or the advertisements. Because groups are not able to complete this task in class, Stella asks students to finish their lists of conclusions as homework for the following lesson. She also informs students that each group will select one social issue to focus on as the unit continues. In subsequent lessons, Stella continues to use “The Last of the Belles” to focus students on developing their skill at identifying key aspects of the socio-cultural context within which the stories that they read were originally written and published. She also emphasizes how drawing conclusions allows them to apply those aspects to contemporary social issues to reflect upon their own social construction.“The Ice Palace” is the first in F. Scott Fitzgerald's trilogy of stories set in fictional Tarleton, Georgia, in the 1920s. As a love story, it provides an excellent tool for students to discuss the construction of gender in romantic relationships. As a “fish out of water” story, it is likewise useful for exploring regional stereotypes that continue to divide the United States, particularly the North and the South. Finally, because the story ends as it begins—with nineteen-year-old Sally Carrol Happer sleepily resting her chin on the sill of an open window on a hot day as would-be suitor Clark Darrow lazily courts her—the plot provides an intriguingly circular structure for exploring how experience is shaped in the process of narration. Despite the “sleepy old side” of her personality, Sally Carrol intends to strike out from home to marry a “Yankee” to appease the restlessness she feels as a young woman stuck in Tarleton. To her the South is a place where things never change, and she pines to experience the North where “things happen on a big scale” (Short Stories 51). Visiting the family of her fiancé, Harry Bellamy, Sally Carrol is first intrigued by the North—“her land now!” (Short Stories 55)—but she gradually becomes disenchanted by several cultural differences: by the failure of her hosts to make her feel at home (Short Stories 57); by Harry's friends’ assumption that she only wants to talk about him; by Harry's “sweeping generalities” about Southerners (Short Stories 63); by the oppressive cold; and by Harry's family insisting on calling her “Sally” instead of her full name. When Sally Carrol becomes separated from Harry in the titular ice palace that is the centerpiece of his hometown winter carnival, she ends up lost in its labyrinthian tunnels for two hours and becomes hypothermic and distraught, finally recognizing she was wrong to leave the warmth and familiarity of Tarleton (Short Stories 68). In this way, the story raises complex questions about the value of striking out from home, especially for young women who traditionally have lacked that option, at least compared to male counterparts.Our hypothetical teacher, Stella, is intrigued by Fitzgerald's rich use of metaphor to embody socio-cultural differences between the North and the South in “The Ice Palace,” and she decides to present a paper on the story at an upcoming literature conference in Ontario, Canada. She arranges to stay with Talia, her long-time friend and former classmate, while at the conference. Talia is now a professor of education who prepares pre-service teachers for high school English classrooms. She also teaches a course on narrative research in an online Masters of Education program. While visiting, Stella will coteach one week in Talia's course.From past conversations with Talia, Stella knows that narrative inquiry is a form of research that seeks to learn more about particular life experiences by studying the stories that people tell about those experiences. “Narrative researchers assume that people makes sense of their lives through storytelling,” Talia had said.10 “One of the best ways to learn more about experience is by examining the stories that people tell about their lives.”Talia explained that narrative researchers typically interview or hold informal conversations with the people who have agreed to participate in their studies and to record the stories that these participants share (Creswell 517). Researchers then retell in their own words, or “restory,” the stories that they have been told. Restorying involves analyzing the stories for key elements, and then rewriting the stories to provide order to them so that they can be analyzed further or shared with others. The new story may be sequenced around the chronology of events that it describes (Creswell 519). Or, it might be organized around elements such as plot and theme (Wiebe 139–64).“Sounds like